Charge It

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

It’s Simple

Via Davar.

If Not Now, When?

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Henry Louis Gates: Here We Go Again

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Why social networks like their privacy policies private

New Scientist:

Social networks continue to grow apace with an estimated 690 million using services like Facebook, MySpace or Orkut worldwide. That’s a phenomenon that concerns privacy advocates worried about users’ data being exploited for commercial or criminal purposes.

You might expect those concerns to lessen as networks compete to have the best privacy policies in the race to gain more users and hence more personal data. However, a team at the University of Cambridge, UK, has found that social networks appear loath to mention privacy to their users. And a recent psychology experiment could explain why.

The Cambridge study, conducted by Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch, examined the privacy provisions and claims of 29 general-purpose social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace.

All of the sites have a privacy policy and many use it to emphasise the importance of user privacy to the company. Seven have even paid for independent privacy certifications provided by the likes of TRUSTe – a commercial site that helps companies maintain privacy policies, and provides a seal of approval intended to reassure end users.

But despite having coughed up the cash, in all cases the networks opted to hide the seal away on the privacy policy page rather than display it on the home page – a fact that suggested to the Cambridge team that networks are not keen to remind users about privacy.

The survey also suggests there is good reason for that; the seven sites that promote their privacy policy appear to be growing more slowly than competitors that do not.

A recent study by Alessandro Acquisti and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, points to why making privacy protection more conspicuous may actually deter users from sharing information.

In the paper, posted this month on the Social Science Research Network, college students were asked to complete a questionnaire about their attitude towards coursework. The team found participants were less likely to reveal wrongdoings if they were first made to think about privacy – even though that was done through an assurance of confidentiality.

This effect, called “privacy saliency”, makes social networks loathe to make visible their efforts to protect privacy, says Acquisti.

Combined with the fact most users – the “pragmatic majority” as security researchers have dubbed them – do not worry about privacy, the result is a market that appears to provide little incentive develop policies that favour users.

Bonneau and Preibusch call for a policy change, with networks agreeing not to share data until a user has explicitly given permission. But given that sharing users’ personal data with third parties seems the only viable business model on offer for the networks, are those calls pie in the sky?

Perhaps not: while the pragmatic majority have a relaxed attitude to privacy, a minority of “privacy fundamentalists” feel differently, according to Bonneau and Preibusch. This group is concerned enough about issues of privacy to potentially embarrass sites through blogs or the media, as happened to Facebook earlier this year. That helps keep social networks on their toes.

And there’s evidence that the pressure is having an effect. The Cambridge analysis found that the oldest and largest sites had a better record on privacy than younger, smaller ones. “One reason for that is the privacy they do provide is reactive,” says Bonneau. The larger sites have learned the hard way that privacy is important.

New Scientist attempted to contact Facebook for an insider’s perspective on this subject, but without success.

After The Beer

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Coffee Shops & The Honor System: Would It Work?

Psychology Today:

What if on your next coffee run, you discover that Starbucks has started running on the honor system? All the baristas are gone, and in their place, you find Tupperware filled with coins and bills. Would you pay for your daily soy Latte? Or would you “forget” to shell out the five bucks? Be honest.

This, of course, is only a thought experiment, as I doubt Starbucks will be adopting the honor policy anytime soon. But in another part of the world, it’s a real question that residents are facing on a daily basis. As the New York Times recently reported, the attorney general’s office in Indonesia has been opening thousands of “honesty cafes” as part of its anticorruption campaign.

The idea is that these cashier-free cafes will teach people to be honest and curb the country’s corruption problem (which pervades business, politics, and education) by inducing residents – especially the young – to get into the habit of practicing honesty. As the Times reports, “…the cafes are meant to force people to think constantly about whether they are being honest and, presumably, make them feel guilty if they are not.”

It’s a laudable plan, and a lovely feel-good idea, but will it work? I have my doubts.

First I think that people will also cheat to a certain extent in these honesty cafes (as they do in our experiments). In fact, according to one Indonesian student, they already do: “Some of my friends don’t pay the right amount.”

But that’s not the worst of it. I worry that these cafes won’t just fail to discourage cheating – they will actually lead to more of it. In some of our research, we found that cheating on one occasion makes it easier for people to cheat again on a later task, because it alters their self-concept. (Think of dieting as an analogy: once you break your diet once, it’s that much easier to say, “Oh what the hey, cut me a slice of that chocolate cake; I’ll count calories again tomorrow.”)

With honesty cafés widespread, residents will have more temptations to cheat, more occasion to cheat, and maybe this will make it such that they will find it easier to cheat again in other contexts.

Maybe these cafes are a good idea, maybe it will not have any effect, but I worry that it might make things worse.

One Step Further

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Where’s The Beef?

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.